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APHORISMS 


I 






1 

APHORISMS 


BY 

CORNELIA DODD BROWN 

it < 




» > 


CHICAGO 

LAURENCE C. WOODWORTH 
PUBLISHER 




Copyright 1919 

BY 

Cornelia Dodd Brown 


c 4 

‘ 4 c 


PRESS OF THE FAITHORN COMPANY, CHIGACO, U. S. A. 


AUG 14 1922 


>1 


©CI.A68138 



/ VW •y 


To the “Friend even dearer than soli- 
tude” and to all Friends, the world over , 
this book is lovingly dedicated. 




CONTENTS 


Action 1 

Adventure . 

Age 

Aims 

Charm .... 

Chivalry . . 

City, The . 

Civilization 
Cleverness . 

Compromise 
Criminals . 

Criticism . . 

Death .... 

Democracy 
Destiny . . . 

Domination 


Duty 10 

Fear 10 

Freedom 11 

Friendship 11 


VII 


O o vO OO K) K) 


Gratitude 12 

Greatness 13 

Happiness 14 

Ideals 14 

Imitation 15 

Intellect 15 

Jealousy 16 

Justice 17 

Life 18 

Loneliness * 19 

Love 19 

Man 22 

Marriage 23 

Naivete 24 

Necessities 24 

Nobility 25 

Non-resistance 25 

Obligations 28 

Passion 28 

Personality 29 

vm 


Pessimism 30 

Pity 31 

Power 33 

Pride 33 

Remorse 33 

Results 34 

Sacrifice 34 

Selfishness 34 

Self-control 35 

Selflessness 35 

Self-realization 35 

Sex 36 

Silence 37 

Social Relations 37 

Soul, The 39 

Strong Souls 40 

Stupidity 40 

Success 41 

Taste 42 

Trust 42 

Understanding 42 

IX 


Virtue 


44 


Weakness 44 

Will 45 

Wisdom 45 

Woman 46 

Worry 47 

Youth 47 

Miscellaneous 48 


X 


APHORISMS 





ACTION 


First understand yourself and then — 
act* 

Activity is not action but may be, in- 
stead, a very prodigal waste of time. 

To be continually “doing something” in 
which our deepest life takes no part is one 
of the most vicious forms of self-destruc- 
tion which our civilization permits to the 
individual. It is a pernicious perversion 
practiced by women of leisure, social re- 
formers, “club men,” and academic teach- 
ers, and the results of the practice are 
leading us to spiritual stagnation. 


A word to those pretentious ones : It 
is not the things that we say and believe 
about ourselves, but the things that we do, 
that lift us above the mob or else make us 
irrevocably a part of it. 

What we talk about is what we aspire to 
be; what we do is what we are. 


*“Only action is living even when it brings death.” 

— Rom ain Roll and. 


One may keep up a continuous round of 
activities without ever doing one thing of 
vital interest to one’s deep, inner life. That 
is the method of life followed by too many 
modern club women. 

It is not alone what one does, but also 
what one fails to do, that may reveal what 
kind of person one is. 

ADVENTURE 

Perfectly “moral” people who have, for 
“practical purposes,” eliminated all of the 
adventure of life, are very sad to contem- 
plate and very depressing to be with. They 
emit an atmosphere of sub-conscious des- 
pair. Healthy people should assume to- 
ward them the same attitude they would 
adopt toward any pernicious disease, and 
young people should be protected from 
them as from all danger of infection. 

AGE 

To life’s masters age brings maturity 
of soul: the expression intensifies, beauty 
and grandeur are in the face as the time- 
mark of divine power within. 


1U 


There are people who cannot be de - 47 
scribed as being old; they are not any age, 
they are just Personality. 

AIMS 

It is not what we do, nor even how we 
fail; it is where we aim that others must 
know how to understand. 

CHARM 

Charm is to have the courage of those 
exquisite courtesies and franknesses that 
are so spontaneously ours when we feel 
that we are loved and understood and 
when we know that what we have to give 
brings happiness to another. 

CHIVALRY 

What can be said of the unchivalrous 
use which is being made of chivalry today 
by women! 

THE CITY 

How it fascinates with its throngs; its 
wonders; its terrible failures and its ter- 
rible successes; its wearinesses; its joys; its 
high efforts and its beautiful realizations; 

[3l 


its myriad ways of arousing one’s interest 
and of satisfying one’s love of life! In it 
one finds interesting people who are stupid 
and stupid people who are interesting — 
and one finds so many of those who have 
lost their way in the light of day or been 
blinded by the stars. 

To love the city with a knowing love, to 
love and possess it without being enslaved 
by it. To love it as those who rule them- 
selves can love a brilliant, artificial creature 
and then give place to any who, in turn, 
can be aroused by that. For — there are, 
also, solitudes filled with fresh, cool morn- 
ing air; there is sun-rise on Italian hills 
and moon-light on olive groves; there is 
the land of Greece where God kissed the 
earth and looks all day from clear eyes 
upon it; and there is the great companion- 
ship of nature of which one never tires 
after one has loved and has tired of “those 
others.” 

The city — solitude. Life’s “secret” 
lies in neither. Life’s secret lies in the 
ability to live ever to the fullest in “the 
mystic now,” nor to ask for more than 
the complete realization of each experience 
while it continues to he an experience. 

[4] 


CIVILIZATION 

The fact that nine-tenths of our leisure 
classes are in a state of restlessness and 
desperation nine-tenths of the time is indis- 
putable proof that our “civilization” is a 
failure. 

Most things that men “believe in” have 
nothing whatever to do with the realities 
of life — that is why men succeed in living 
so entirely unnaturally in our modern civil- 
ization. 

One would think that the present system 
of society was designed to perfect the 
eunuch and the master of hyprocrisy as 
surviving types! 

CLEVERNESS 

All clever people appreciate the power 
of art over naturalness — only great souls 
can afford to be natural. 

The mob’s idol is always what the mob 
itself , is — plus cleverness. 

COMPROMISE 

When a man has “made his compro- 

[5l 


mise with things as they are” his real life 
has stopped. He may, and generally does, 
become a prominent member of his com- 
munity — but his personality will steadily 
decrease in greatness. 

All compromise must have as its goal 
the achievement of some objective aim 
entirely foreign to the real life of the indi- 
vidual. It ends in an increasing dishar- 
mony of soul and can have only a nega- 
tive result from any cosmic point of view. 

CRIMINALS 

There is a species of cosmic criminal 
abroad who conforms with all of the laws 
except those that are divine. 

Those who break the laws of “society” 
are called “criminals” but nothing is said 
about the criminals who have made some 
of those laws or who help to uphold them. 

CRITICISM 

If one cannot see all that happens in a 
spirit of love, better to look with interest 
— even with curiosity — than to criticise and 
condemn. 


[6] 


DEATH 

Death and Solitude are the two great 
adventures of man. 

To die is to go on into a new life — prob- 
ably of our own creating. 

To will one’s departure from the earth 
when one chooses to go would be to meet 
destiny upon almost equal terms. 

To the bereaved ones : It is more essen- 
tial to be what our loved one is than it is 
to be where our loved one is. 

Meditating — upon events from “the pal- 
lid float” to the beginning of our planet- 
drama and so on down to the present: 
The float, the formation, the cooling, 
the first individual form, and finally the 
great animals : the lion, the tiger. Those 
splendid, free, glorious specimens: know- 
ing power, knowing conquest, knowing 
love, knowing comradship, knowing grief, 
knowing only the noble emotions and liv- 
ing in instinctive cosmic consciousness 
which gave them “that look” in their eyes. 

And then the monkey triumphed ! Life 

[7l 


went on thru him! All became cunning, 
deception, deceit. The struggle no longer 
took place openly and without fear, defeat 
no longer came powerfully with a roar of 
rage, success no longer came to the great 
and powerful creature who rested only to 
fight again. All became insidious, insinu- 
ating, sly. 

We do not fight great creatures now, 
but small, infinitesimal ones that steal into 
the organism and live upon the life-blood. 
Cunning! Cunning! Cunning triumphed! 
Man is indeed “the cunning animal.” Man 
is still the monkey and society is still in the 
trees. There it hides itself from the open 
arena where only power and strength sur- 
vive. The struggle is no longer one of 
strength against strength, it is now cun- 
ning against cunning, or — sadder still — 
cunning against nobility. 

Injustice has triumphed, so far, upon 
this earth because the weak predominate. 
Trick, deceive, lie, cheat, ape — that is the 
method still. And for those who refuse — 
death ! Then how glorious death becomes ! 
Better to die than to stoop to such meth- 
ods, better to belong to the dying species 
that disdains to pretend. Better to go out 

m 


with the lion than on with the ape — until 
that day shall dawn when cunning shall 
perish of its own limitations and strength 
shall again come forth, shorn of its emas- 
culating virtues, to new struggles and to 
new victories over ever nobler and more 
worthy foes. 

DEMOCRACY 

Under the rule of a wise and great-vis- 
ioned dictator Democracy has never failed 
to bring forth brilliant results. 

DESTINY 

A man’s thoughts are his destiny. 

In our calculations we must always rec- 
ognize fate; in our efforts we must never 
admit ’tis there. 

DOMINATION 

To succeed in dominating another is to 
commit a psychic murder. 

Under the domination of an inferior 
person all that is weak in one becomes 
exaggerated, because one is held by one’s 

l9l 


weaknesses, and all that is strong in one 
becomes the limit of endurance, instead of 
being a stepping-stone to new strength. 

X" What vicious vulgarity exists in those 
who seek to force their will upon another ! 
They can only succeed as murderers — and 
fortunate are they then if it is a body in- 
stead of a soul that they have destroyed. 

DUTY 

Duty never yet existed except as an emo- 
tion in the hearts of the brave and the 
strong. The poor theory of duty is only 
a means by which weakness disguises its 
own inability to act. 

“Duty” : one starts by sacrificing oneself 
X " and ends by sacrificing many others. 

FEAR 

Men seldom try to please what no 
longer pleases them — except thru fear. 

Almost all women “disapprove” of what 
they admire in other women and they 
really admire what they disapprove of in 


men — which shows that fear and not mor- 
ality generally governs woman’s “judg- 
ments.” 

FREEDOM 

When a person must give up social 
standing for freedom it is sad, but when 
one gives up freedom for social security it 
is hopeless. 

Those who take “freedom” while still 
regarding the expedient are merely educat- 
ing themselves in the methods of hypoc- 
risy. 

The people who occasionally commit 
adultery are punished by society, but the 
married people who continually commit 
adultery are respected by society — which 
shows that it is not our weaknesses but our 
liberties that others begrudge us. 

FRIENDSHIP 

The world needs a higher ideal of hu- 
man relationship, one that contains divine 
friendship, to supersede the sorry sex con- 
flict that mankind is used to now. 


[ii] 


What most people call friendship is an 
exchange-alliance for passing away the 
time. 

No one great enough to be a friend 
would ever allow a “love affair” to dis- 
rupt a friendship; no one great enough to 
know real love would ever need to make 
the choice. 

The one thing that we have to deserve 
in order to receive is friendship. 

True friendship is the gentlest and the 
most joy-endowing gift that we have to 
bestow upon one another. 

Most of what another craves of the 
divine, and all that is divine within our- 
selves, is required of us in the sacred rela- 
tion with a friend. 

GRATITUDE 

Tho the strong are sometimes weak 
enough to know pity they are never poor 
enough to feel gratitude. 

[iU 


GREATNESS 


Great people are not an indulgence but 
an opportunity to those who love them — 
therein lies their greatness. 

A selfish person is always true to a 
theory: the most expedient one; a great 
person is always true to a principle: the 
most beautiful revelation of those times 
when the soul is “in vision.’’ 

Only those who are able to master medi- 
ocrity are able to meet greatness upon 
equal terms. 

Great souls love where their highest 
aspirations find companionship and an un- 
derstanding sympathy, and where the ef- 
fort toward an ever greater self is needed 
of them. Leave it for small souls to 
“love” where they find the greatest com- 
fort. 

Better a strong bad person than a weak 
“good” person, but the promise of our 
race lies in those who are both strong and 
great. 


To enter into relationships for what one 
“gets out of it” is to be human — “all-too- 
human”; to Accept only the relationship of 
those to whom one is willing, and able , to 
give one’s best, is to be almost divine. 

Great men work without fear of evil, 
without compromise with ignorance, and 
only such men subdue the past and create 
the future anew. 

HAPPINESS 

If it is from our hardest experiences 
that we learn our greatest lessons, it is be- 
cause of our happiest experiences that we 
have the strength to endure those lessons. 

IDEALS 

An ideal worth dying for: To see as 
God would see — to love as God would 
love — to do — to ask nothing. 

Courage ye Idealists! We still have 
the soul of Jesus, the mind of Plato, the 
mysterious cosmic clairvoyance of Emer- 
son, the beautiful faith of Maeterlinck, the 
terrible will of Nietzsche, all whose yearn- 
ing has struggled into vision, our glimpse 

[14] 


of the divine in the eyes of those we have 
loved, and — the ceaseless urge of our own 
souls. 

IMITATION 

Oscar Wilde could not get enough out 
of his lectures to live on — but many of the 
young speakers who have followed him 
have lived on little else than what they 
have gotten out of Wilde’s lectures. 

INTELLECT 

Objective intellectual rules are futile at- 
tempts to conquer psychic laws. There is 
a weak falseness about those who attempt 
such a mode of life. The emotions be- 
come unhealthy and cease to guide truly 
and the personality is adrift. 

Back of a great heart must be a great 
mind directing the emotions and enforcing 
the Will. 

Most of our academicians are men who 
have trained the mind into an entirely 
unnatural and foreign development — a use 
for which the mind was never intended by 
the organism. 

[i 5l 


When a man “goes to pieces” at a cer- 
tain age people say he is a “sexual per- 
vert”; what he really is, generally, is an 
intellectual pervert. His experience al- 
ways results from some previous unsound 
surrender of life to the intellect. 

All objective use of the intellect is ma- 
licious and meddlesome. The intellect is 
only valid and valuable when it acts as the 
servant of the sub-conscious. Then per- 
fection? — must come thru experience, or, 
as Walter Pater put it, “thru a series of 
disgusts.” 

JEALOUSY 

To those “jealous” ones: Never de- 
mand a promise and never try to force 
from others what must be earned from 
them. 

When a man is thoroughly bored at 
home his wife accuses every woman whom 
he admires of “running after him” — it is 
her way of trying to disguise his lack of 
interest in her. 


When one woman cannot compete with 
[16] 


another in any other way she grows right- 
eously “moral” and astracizes — which 
makes her rival perfectly irresistible to the 
man. 

A woman who watches her husband 
closely enough can make any other woman 
(even the most mediocre) attractive to 
him, by the sheer charm of novelty and 
the difficulty of pursuit. Such wives make 
seductive effort on the part of other women 
entirely unnecessary. 

One of “Life’s Little Ironies” : The 
wives of domestically bored public men 
acting as self-appointed detectives and liv- 
ing on revenue derived from the man they 
coerce. This is the most ironic form of 
modern graft. 

JUSTICE 

The present-day man says: “Love is the 
greatest thing in the world” ; the future- 
day man will say: “Justice is the greatest 
thing in the world” : — that justice which 
the philosopher of the future has defined 
as, “Love with seeing eyes.” 

[17] 


The true justice will be as scrupulous 
about not doing for others what they do 
not deserve as it is today unscrupulous 
about doing for others what they do de- 
serve. 

* LIFE 

The two great gifts that life has to 
bestow are Love and Solitude. 

Life gives us our task. If we accept it 
we can bear all of our agonies and yet find 
peace; if we reject it we miss altogether 
the realization of ourselves. 

All great life and love seem to be a mat- 
ter of patience and choices. 

Life is experiment and change, adven- 
ture and experience, of an ever ascending 
kind and if leisure does not bring increased 
opportunity for life it offers only the stag- 
nation of “a living” wrongly secured. 

Human life can have only one “pur- 
pose”: the fullest creative experience of 
living. Judged in that way, the only 
“meaning” that we can put into life is that 


which we do to make a greater experience 
possible for the life that will follow our 
own. 

Life is so stupid that one is kept inter- 
ested trying to fathom such an outrageous 
experience and it is such a bore that one is 
in a constant state of excitement seeking 
diversion. 

LONELINESS 

Loneliness — not conscience* — makes 
cowards of the great. One must indeed 
“learn to be an alone one” if one is not to 
stoop for what one craves. 

Many admire and try to please great- 
ness but few know how to companion the 
great soul. The great soul is alone ! 

LOVE 

We have not loved until we have loved 
another, not only better than anything in 
our life, but better than the collective of 
our life. 

♦“Conscience does make Cowards of us all.” 

— Shakespeare. 


A love that cannot include and trans- 
cend great friendship is too crude a love 
for noble natures. 

The person by whom one has been 
loved generally indicates little in regard 
to one’s character; how one has loved an- 
other, however, indicates all that one is. 

People who fear love as a pleasurable 
self-indulgence have seen no truth but their 
own weakness. All real love is great, 
creative, cosmic work and holds, for those 
capable of it, all of the stern demands of 
the soul’s noblest efforts. 

Great love is not a gift, for all gifts 
necessitate benefactor and benefited. The 
only great love is an exchange. 

It is not by receiving from great natures, 
but by becoming able to give what great 
natures need, that lovers are tested into 
growth. 

With people of a certain type love takes 
on a new and a spiritual quality. It then 
has primarily to do with something that 

[20] 


they are bringing to the birth within them- 
selves. 

We must not only help those we love 
to be happy — we must also help them to 
be great. 

Our value for those who love us is in 
proportion to the depth and the purity of 
what we need from them. 

We are drawn by and love the greatness 
in another; we are repelled and suffer be- 
cause of the weakness — and that other is 
also knowing the same joy and union, the 
same pain and loneliness, thru us. 

The story of a man’s loves is the history 
of his ascent. 

In love: to be “left” by a line person 
means that we have failed, to be left by an 
inferior person, however, means only that 
they have failed. It is well to understand 
how to make this distinction. 

The things for which the spirit yearns 
the lover learns to be. 


God help those who know how to love 
and pity those who do not. 

MAN 

Man is Life’s effort for a conscious self- 
control and self-direction. 

A man must be so self-assured that he 
can do only what is true to him, and he 
must be so brave that he will do nothing 
else. 

American men are really the most un- 
kind of all to women. Their sentimental- 
ity makes of their wives silly or tyran- 
nical fools who ruin their husbands and 
spoil the lives of their children. 

When a man can neither give her hap- 
piness, nor allow her to find it elsewhere, 
he becomes a boor in the eyes of the 
woman he professes to love. And to a 
woman a boor is always her sex enemy. 

Another of “Life’s Little Ironies” : 
After a man has had too many affaires du 
coeur he becomes incapable of enjoying 
any woman but the one he fails to get. 

[22] 


MARRIAGE 

Nothing is more certain than that mar- 
riage, as we know it today, must go. It 
is too often detrimental to the highest and 
best life of the highest and best type of 
people. 

By tantrums, tirades, and threats, some 
women make death — or undeserved dis- 
honor — the only available exit from an 
unhappy marriage. 

The social firmament is more filled with 
dead marriages than the heavens with dead 
suns. Only a new contact with cosmic 
force will save the light of life from blink- 
ing out on earth entirely. 

If the worse class of men did wrongs to 
women under the marriage system of a 
generation ago, the worse class of women 
are certainly using a lenient public opinion 
to aid them in ruining the lives of the 
better class of men under our system of 
marriage today. 

The only way for most married people 
to save either their morals or their zest for 


[23] 


life is by becoming beautiful friends. 
Friendly marriages are the triumph of 
mind over monotony. 

Yet another of “Life’s Little Ironies”: 
The spectacle of a world full of people 
who are not really living at all because 
each is bound by a mistake made years be- 
fore — marriage 1 

NAIVETE 

Naivete of manner is charming; naivete 
of thought is merely — amusing. 

Those who think that the purpose of 
love is always the production of children 
are spiritually too naive to be treated with 
more than patience. 

NECESSITIES 

Genius never makes habits of its neces- 
sities — which is the only way that necessi- 
ties ever can become permanent. 

Material things should not interest us 
until they are beyond the realm of neces- 
sities; people and ideas, on the contrary, 

[24I 


should only interest us after they have a 
place in the realm of our deepest needs. 

NOBILITY 

Who can fathom the depth of nobility 
in one who achieves a complete self-renun- 
ciation ! 

Noble people do not have to persuade — 
they need only appear. 

The pagan said : “Harm your enemy” ; 
the Christian says : “Love your enemy” ; 
the super-man will say: “Enoble your 
enemy,” for only those lacking in nobility 
can be the enemy of the super-man. But 
— when we ennoble another we cause that 
other to suffer even as we ourselves have 
suffered ! 

Our understanding of humanity grows 
thru observation of what is done by others, 
but our belief in mankind is mostly due to 
the degree of nobility in our own acts. 

NON-RESISTANCE 

One grows to believe that for the Man 
of Nazareth “resist not evil” meant avert 


(avoid) not evil; that he was thinking of 
the results of one’s actions upon one’s self, 
rather than of the method of one’s con- 
duct; that in his belief in a life of absolute 
loyalty to the Individual Truth within 
one’s self, his power lay in the courage to 
affirm himself and to let follow what evil 
must result from the ignorance and selfish- 
ness and fear in others. One cannot see 
that he ever put anything above being one 1 s 
self. And, from a man aggressive enough 
to drive the money-lenders from the tem- 
ple, “turn the other cheek” really must 
express a greatness sufficiently exalted to 
be able to accept an ignorant injustice with 
magnanimity, because to be true to one’s 
self is to be beyond injury from others. 

It seems not a mode of action, then, that 
Jesus gave to men, but a means of assur- 
ance to the Self within each man that It 
might not be overwhelmed by injustice and 
so compromise with it. Jesus had that 
kind of power that Nietzsche describes as : 
“the highest sensation of power and secur- 
ity; which finds expression in grandeur of 
style. That power which no longer re- 
quires to be proved; which scorns to 
please; which responds only with difficulty; 

[26] 


which feels no witnesses around it; which 
is oblivious to the fact that it is being op- 
posed; which relies on itself fatalistically, 
and is a law among laws : — such power ex- 
presses itself quite naturally in grandeur of 
style.” 

Such is the supreme expression of the 
power of the soul and Jesus, like Nietzsche, 
could also have said: “I hanker after my- 
self * * * I base my ethics upon the high- 
est possible expression of self.” With both 
it was the inner, the personal, that was of 
value. It was what one became , and not 
the method of one’s action, that was im- 
portant. The emphasis is upon what one 
is and not upon one’s conduct, for it is imi- 
tation of any man’s way of meeting life 
that is ruinous to the life in another. What 
the great soul does in a powerful scorn 
of exterior results, in a divine disinterest- 
edness of self; the weak soul can imitate 
only in form, never in impulse. And in 
imitation there is always stagnation and 
loss of power and of self-expression — thru 
imitation never yet has come self-realiza- 
tion. 


[27] 


OBLIGATIONS 

We cannot always do what is expected 
of us by Society if we accomplish what is 
required of us by Life. 

PASSION 

To make physical passion “an end in 
itself’’ is to make pleasure the meaning of 
life. 

The ability to give one’s self physically 
where one has not in some way given one’s 
self spiritually is the mark of an undevel- 
oped soul. For the mature soul no such 
thing is possible as a “merely physical” 
relationship. 

To those prudish ones: There never 
yet was a man with a great and powerful 
soul who did not have strong and joyful 
physical passions. 

Unintelligent curiosity and unrestrained 
desire almost always accompany one an- 
other in the undisciplined nature. 

There is a difference between real free- 
dom and license which it would be as re- 


[28] 


freshing to have the licentious discover as 
to have the conventional-minded know. It 
is, that truly free people are self-eman- 
cipated from serving the undisciplined de- 
mands of their own emotional natures, as 
well as from compliance with social dicta- 
tion in regard to the fulfilment of their 
solely personal experiences. 

PERSONALITY 

Personality is proportionate to depth of 
insight and to continuity of power to main- 
tain conscious, intellectual control of one’s 
self. 

To achieve Personality, great courage 
and long endurance of loneliness are essen- 
tial: in other words — a divine disinterest- 
edness in regard to the welfare of one’s 
smaller self. 

“Doing things for others” may be the 
expression of a rich and overflowing per- 
sonality, or it may merely be the mark of 
poverty and resourcelessness in the person- 
ality. 

It takes an exceptionally strong person- 
[29I 


ality to survive kindness — it is so easy to 
experience a collapse of will when one is 
helped. Perhaps it is an instinct of self- 
preservation that makes lonely men avoid 
those who only partially know how to love 
them. 

> If you want to win the people who love 
possessions, possess all that you can and 
they will love what you have. But if you 
long to win the people who love person- 
ality, be all that you can and they will love 
what you are. 

PESSIMISM 

Pessimists are too wise to believe in 
theology and not wise enough to believe 
in religion. 

Pessimism: the weary-mood of sensual- 
ism. 

Pessimists have known only a superficial 
kind of doubt. But that other doubt, from 
which is born effort and determination and 
creative will — what pessimist, with his 
“nothing matters,” has known that? 


The answer to pessimism : There is 
only one way to get into this life the thing 
that we long to find here — it is to be that 
thing ourselves. 

If one could believe, with the pessimists, 
in extinction, how simple life would be- 
come ! Some sorrow and pain endured, 
some kindness done, all of the happiness 
that one could achieve, and then — rest. 
But how much more stern is that which 
some of us must believe ! How much 
more difficult! How much more terrible! 
How much more mysterious! 

It is a belief in the small bit-at-a-time 
that we can create from life for life, by 
putting forth the resolve of the soul — un- 
ending, uncertain, unassured. A matter of 
courage, of endurance, of insight, of wis- 
dom. The result, unknowable; the process, 
God; the time, eternity; the goal, the tem- 
porary pause of realization — which but 
fits for and necessitates new effort and a 
new realization. 

PITY 

Pity: an antique virtue that died of self- 
131 1 


satisfaction when it did not starve to death 
from lack of wisdom. 

Pity: the last and noblest of mistakes. 

In great souls “pity” gives place to an 
understanding sympathy: wise, patient, 
and determined; sharing, examining, and 
achieving with others. 

One’s imagination is stirred by great 
suffering, great renunciation, great ap- 
propriation, noble failure; but the failures 
of the weak, like the sufferings of the 
weak, are of interest only to those naive 
natures that know only “pity.” 

There is an elevation beyond the need 
of either sympathy or pity, and when one 
has reached that elevation nothing can help 
one except the understanding which is 
alikeness. To the one who can give that, 
one can say anything, but almost always 
one says — nothing. 

Almost always the people who need 
“help” do not deserve to receive it. 

[32 1 


POWER 


When we lose the power of the spirit 
with others, it is because they sense fear 
and deception in us where there should be 
unconquerable courage and perfect frank- 
ness. 

Power comes thru the exercise of fac- 
ulty, not thru the quest for pleasure, and 
such power is happiness. 

To each one of us must come the neces- 
sity and the ability to “go on” alone. 

PRIDE 

There is a pride that makes noble na- 
tures incapable of an inferior action; but 
the pride that keeps up an appearance 
before “the world,” by means of pretense 
and injustice, is a petty and a sick emotion. 

REMORSE 

To wish to undo the past can mean only 
one thing — that we have not conquered 
our experiences and “possessed and used 
them.” 


[33 1 


Remorse and regret are weaknesses of 
the weak. The strong know only the stab 
of realization and then — resolve. 

RESULTS 

Results are so certain and we create so 
much more than we realize! Perhaps we 
ourselves create all that we experience, 
perhaps there is no such thing as a result 
produced in our lives by another ! 

Life is tragically hard but it is not with- 
out great results. 

SACRIFICE 

Submission and self-sacrifice are merely 
ways of letting other people establish in 
this universe the thing that they are. If 
we are superior to another our duty to 
Life is to establish the thing that we are. 
Seen in this light, self-sacrifice may become 
a great wrong, or a great good, entirely 
according to who practices it. 

SELFISHNESS 

Selfishness demands that one do what 
pleases it; love desires that one express 
and fulfill one 1 s self. 

[ 34 ] 


SELF-CONTROL 


It shows a development of great and 
very unusual self-control to be able to love 
others in spite of the things in them that 
one dislikes. 

SELFLESSNESS 

There is a divine disregard of self in all 
great action — the personal consequences 
are immaterial: what happens afterward 
is what we fail to do or what is done to 
us — what happens at the time we act is 
what we are. 

SELF-REALIZATION 

Only complete self-realization is life — 
even when it leads one to one’s death. 

Those strong enough to accept criticism, 
suspicion, and loneliness, for the sake of 
doing their work in the world, not only 
help to change social standards, but also 
learn the great lesson of self-dependence. 

It is never what we do that matters, but 
only what we become thru doing it. 

[35l 


To master life one must believe in one’s 
self and such belief can come only from 
absolute loyalty to the self within. 

Do not be impatient with the unhappy 
ones; do not despise those timid ways; do 
not dislike that reserved, sometimes almost 
sullen, manner; do not misunderstand those 
combative, almost angry, looks — in all 
such there is gestation and birth. 

Whoever tests our highest power to 
give brings us growth. 

When we reach the place in “love” 
where we must either renounce our indi- 
viduality or else give up our lover, it is 
better to give up the lover. To renounce 
our individuality is to become a nonentity 
and so to lose our lover. But, with cour- 
age to renounce the lover, personality can 
but gain in self-dependence and then noth- 
ing has really happened — except that the 
lover has lost us ! 

SEX 

Some can sell their sex to procure for 
themselves what they want of material 

[36] 


possessions; others can only give their sex 
where they have found what the spirit 
needs ! 

Male courtesans, also, are purchased 
with presents and enslaved by ease. To 
be a courtesan is not a matter of sex but 
a matter of temperament. 

In the sex conflict a permission of free- 
dom is either a test or a withdrawal. 

SILENCE 

The silence between two people may be 
a vacuum or it may be a communion closer, 
more intense, and more alive than anything 
their minds, or their bodies, can express. 

SOCIAL RELATIONS 

Those who can command the respect of 
the public can afford to renounce its ap- 
proval. 

We live at a time when not to have 
been “ruined” socially is either a sign of 
rare good fortune or else a mark of moral 
cowardice. 


[ 37 ] 


Support their dead social institutions 
and any amount of deception, any depth 
of self-betrayal, will be permitted one by 
“society.” 

Mon Dieu! How the stupid women 
must have gossiped about Jesus! There 
was Mary Magdalene — and the other 
Mary — and Martha ! And he was seen 
in public with the woman of Samaria ! 
Moreover, Jesus really loved those wom- 
en — a fact which no gossip could under- 
stand. 

The relations we buy from others are 
never worth what we pay for them, only 
what we take from others has any real 
value for us. (One expects this to be 
thoroughly misunderstood.) 

To know people very slightly is the 
great art of acquaintance, then one can 
believe of others all of which one’s imag- 
ination is capable. To know people well 
means that one must think of them as they 
are — and few people can survive being 
known as they really are. 

[38] 


“Liberal circles” : where the men dis- 
avow all law and the women use all laws 
(social and infernal) to hold the men. 

Certainly if we are “nice” to people 
they will “like” us: in other words, if we 
do what others want done they will like it. 
But it all depends upon what others want 
done! We should be indifferent to whether 
the weak, the lazy, the uncomprehending, 
the petty-selfish, the stupid, like us or not. 
We should not want them to like, but to 
admire and respect and even to fear us. 

We need approval only from those who 
demand great things of us. The others 
may dislike or disapprove, one withdraws 
from them that one may have more to give 
— one does not withdraw in petty selfish- 
ness however. 

A man has a right to almost any situa- 
tion in which he is giving to others; he sel- 
dom has a right to those situations in 
which he receives from others. 

SOUL 

The soul, like the solar system, is order 
builded out of chaos. Good: thus becomes 


[39l 


the gaining of an ever greater understand- 
ing, control, and direction of the forces 
within one’s self. Evil : is seen to be an 
organized disorder, systematically at work 
for its own selfish ends. 

People are great in proportion to their 
ability to follow — instead of dictating to — 
the soul. 

When we “go away” from another it is 
always spirit and never space that really 
separates us. 

STRONG SOULS 

Strong souls do not carry into a new 
relation the habits of old conditions. Per- 
haps that is one of the greatest proofs of 
the power of a strong soul. 

Far-seeing souls must be prepared to 
meet the probable as well as the possible 
— God help them ! 

STUPIDITY 

Stupidity so often misleads us by being 
“nice” that we are in danger of not realiz- 
ing how really pernicious it is. 

[40] 


“Good” people are not any better than 
other people — they are just stupider, that 
is all. 

Nothing equals the stupidity with which 
people condemn whatever differs from the 
average. It is a stupidity even lacking in 
curiosity and zest for solving a problem. 

People who never do anything to have a 
good time in this world deserve the fate 
they suffer. 

One more of “Life’s Little Ironies” : To 
come of a very old family seems to give 
some women an idea of their own superior- 
ity without supplying them with any ability 
to impress it upon others. 

SUCCESS 

A successful life too often becomes an 
arrested life. Success means past great- 
ness but when it becomes a goal it means 
present stagnation: for in order to pre- 
serve any situation great sacrifices are nec- 
essary — while one is holding one’s “suc- 
cess” one is also being held from a new 
success.* 


[41] 


The great man rises because of his use- 
fulness, success is an incident of his serv- 
ice: the avenue of his contribution to life. 
The ambitious man rises because he has 
perseverance and determination and suc- 
cess is the goal of his personal ambition. 
One is the servant of Life, the other a mas- 
ter of circumstance. One serves mankind, 
the other serves self. 

TASTE 

All the envious old ladies to the con- 
trary, “taste” is not a matter of money but 
a matter of — taste . 

TRUST 

To trust every one is to be a naive fool, 
but to mistrust every one is to be a fool 
without the redemption of naivete. 

UNDERSTANDING 
The most dangerous thing in the world 
is to listen to others. One may ruin one’s 
whole life in that way. It is only by ob- 

♦“Now understand me well — it is provided in the 
essence of things that from any fruition of success, no 
matter what, shall come forth some thing to make a 
greater struggle necessary.” Walt Whitman. 


serving others and by knowing how to un- 
derstand what they do that one is safe 
with them. This should be taught to 
the young with the alphabet — especially 
should it be taught to girl babies. 

Never explain! People understand only A"" 
what they themselves can see. 

A small part of the misery of this world 
is caused by what happens, the greatest 
part of the world-misery is caused by our 
failure to understand what happens. 

Asking questions is the most inefficient 
way in the world to find out anything. Ob- 
serve and analyze. If one is not capable 
of doing that one would be incapable of 
understanding what one was told. Besides, 
very few people can explain their deepest 
actions to others, or even to themselves — 
and then not until long after they have 
done them. 

Small people indulge in small actions 
which others understand and despise. 

Noble natures seek the strength and the 
self-control to merely look at what occurs 

[43l 


until they can understand, nor to form any 
opinion until they do understand. For 
nobility strives, ever, to attain that insight 
which will explain all action as it has its 
meaning in the life of the soul. 

We can find no way to explain human 
suffering until we have learned how to un- 
derstand that nothing happens to us but 
all takes place within us. 

VIRTUE 

When people cease to be virtuous in the 
conventional sense they are beginning to 
be virtuous from the cosmic point of view. 

WEAKNESS 

The weak owe a great debt to Christian- 
ity — it gave them the only kind of self- 
respect that the weak may ever enjoy. 

Weakness is keen for rules, promises, 
obligations, and enforced methods; only 
strength dares freedom. 

Timidity is always a bad sign — a sign 
of weakness. Sensitiveness and reserve, 


however, are always signs of a superior ^ — " 
and a powerful personality. 

The lack of self-confidence is a flaw in 
character that brings about a lifetime of 
tragedy. 

One disadvantage of living with the 
weak is their vindictive mental atmosphere 
— one has to hear them continually trying 
to pull every one down. 

WILL 

Not to any gods, but to his own Will, 
must man look for all that he attains of 
the divine. 

Will is the “savior’’ of mankind — in- 
carnate in each man. 

WISDOM 

Not Love but Wisdom must be the next 
god of man. 

When the eyes of wisdom look into the 
eyes of “fate” it is the eyes of fate that 
are lowered. 


It belongs to the enduring nature of a 
saint to love and accept and yield; thru 
the creative qualities of a god works a 
wiser and a sterner love. 

WOMAN 

Woman: almost always looking out for 
“a living” — seldom attempting to live! 

The women who do not love men live 
at the expense of the women who do love 
them and they do it by slander and by the 
aid of a blind public opinion ! 

Woman’s “intuition” is amazing — it en- 
ables her to ferret out all the facts in a 
man’s life except how completely she is 
boring him ! 

Those women who commit mechanical 
motherhood are too spiritually weak and 
too spiritually vulgar to be factors in the 
life of the future. 

When one hears a woman speak of en- 
forcing her “rights as a wife” one may 
know that one has touched the bottom of 
the abyss of vulgarity. 

[46] 


Woman must be an equal and a mate to 
man; when she “follows” him she can but 
follow to his ruin. 

Some women “help” a man at the crit- 
ical time when his best welfare depends 
upon his ability to win thru without help. 

The women who make homes for men 
and create new life there are the greatest 
of all women — even “reform” is second- 
ary to that ! 

Most women know entirely too much to 
be fascinating and entirely too little to be 
interesting. 

WORRY 

It is always bourgeois to worry — no 
true intellectual aristocrat knows a suffer- 
ing less noble than grief. 

YOUTH 

The young have wisdom unspoiled by 
“experience.” 


[ 47 ] 


14 86 314 


MISCELLANEOUS 

“One must find the grain in things and 
work with it” — but what put the grain into 
things? 

Some seem to contain a great depth of 
love without affection in it, others an abyss 
of affection devoid of love. An abyss 
holds nothing. 

The psychologists of the Twentieth 
Century are saving the Bible for the future. 

All personal reaction to what is lovable 
in others is a matter of character. It either 
takes the form of love or hate. 

Some people reduce us to such a state 
of unhappiness that we have nothing left 
to bind us to them but their kindness to us 
— a kindness that cannot take the place of 
all that we need and do not receive from 
them. 

We spendthrifts: when we are unhappy 
spend too much in order that we may make 
life more bearable; when we are happy, in 
order that we may make life more beauti- 
ful — and we are always either one or the 
- other. 


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